Corporate Sustainability

Sustainable Development is the overarching working template in ONGC and this finds expression in our commitment to continually enhance the triple bottom line benchmarks of economic, environmental and social performance.

We realized that focussed carbon management efforts were an ideal route to cover the elements of our business specific sustainable development issues across the environmental dimension. A critical area of environmental sustainability is mitigation of global greenhouse gas from operations.

We have six registered CDM projects (a unique feat amongst CPSEs) with a total saving of 2,09,643 tons of CO2 per year for 10 years. Six more CDM projects are under registration which will significantly add to the portfolio of our carbon credits.

It is an organizational objective for us to progressively reduce our carbon footprint, by working towards reduction in both direct and indirect energy consumption. We plan to make a comprehensive, organization wide GHG inventory that covers both direct and indirect energy over the next two to three years. This would provide the overall carbon footprint of the organization and help identify mitigation opportunities. A pilot exercise to assess GHG footprint of our representative operating units has already been completed. This pilot is now being scaled up into a pan ONGC GHG accounting exercise to assess our organisational carbon footprint and importantly to undertake a rigorous study for identification of all feasible GHG mitigation opportunities. The pan ONGC carbon foot printing exercise is likely to be completed in 2013 and provide us with a number of viable mitigation projects at hand to work upon.

National Gas Star program

An innovative, interesting climate change mitigation work program for us is the identification, quantification and reduction of fugitive methane emissions from our production operations. For this we entered into an MoU with the United States Environment Protection Agency (USEPA) in August 2007, to undertake Methane to Market (now GMI) projects in ONGC under its Natural Gas STAR Program to promote development, implementation and reporting of profitable, voluntary methane emission mitigation activities.

The technical collaboration between the U.S. EPA and the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation (ONGC) under the MoU, administered under the GMI Partnership, has built a strong base of knowledge and capacity within ONGC to cost-effectively reduce methane emissions now and into the future.

As of now ONGC has reduced approx 10.54 MMSCM since joining the partnership in 2007 which is equivalent to reducing 150,000 tCO2e from the atmosphere and we have chalked out an elaborate plan to map all our production installations for fugitive hydrocarbon emission and make the installations leak free in the coming few years. As of now we have completed leak detection & measurement at 56 relevant facilities. Once achieved its planned objective, it would be a remarkable feat for ONGC and the Oil & gas Industry at large in India.

Sustainable Water Management

We are also working on a company-wide "Sustainable Water Management Strategy" aimed at reduction in specific fresh water consumption and reporting on the water footprint based on internationally recognised standards and practices. Our action plans include baseline assessment of water use, build reporting capability in the short term followed by operation specific sustainable water management plans, location specific SOPs with water recycling, and reuse targets as appropriate in the medium to long term.

Sustainability Reporting

Ever cognizant of the necessity of being accountable, responsive and transparent to the wider body of stakeholders we commenced sustainability reporting based on the globally recognized Global Reporting Initiative (GRI-G3) guidelines in 2009-10. We are in the process of releasing our third consecutive independently assured GRI-G3 based Sustainability Report. We will continue to bring out externally assured sustainability reports through which we will strive to improve our overall engagement with stakeholders, be accountable for our triple bottom line performance and help improve the same.

At ONGC, we firmly believe that sustainable development requires all societal players to contribute their mite and as the nation's leading corporate citizen, we have been and will always be contributing our best for sustainable development.